VoxCAST / Voxel CDN experience?

Question

I see Voxel quoting $.10/GB, no monthly commitment. At our traffic level, this is significantly cheaper than I'm getting quoted from more established CDN's (generally .18-.22/GB).

Anyone have any experience using them? Thoughts?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Voxel's CDN doesn't have many edge locations compared with someone like Akamai or LimeLight or even MaxCDN. So latency will likely be worse, which makes it less attractive for general site acceleration. But latency matters little for streaming video, as connection overhead is basically zero when compared with the rest of the traffic. Cheaper CDNs can have a lot of cache churn at their (fewer and smaller) edge nodes, meaning if your content isn't really popular, you will see many origin requests and worse performance.

As for personal experience with VoxCAST, mine sucked, but not because of their network. I didn't get that far. When I tried to set up an account several months ago, the signup process was horribly broken. I kept getting asked to re-login, and told the password I had just reset using their site was incorrect. When I finally got in after a support call, their control panel was so sparse and odd-behaving I thought it was a cross-browser problem, but things were messed up even in IE8. I eventually just gave up, deciding that the frustration wasn't worth it when there are so many alternatives.

The neat thing about CDNs is that it is easy to test several of them at the same time on a live site. This can be done any number of ways. We generally spit out URLs to a test CDN in our source pages to about 1% of visitors (based on a randomly generated cookie), and observe metrics the CDN provides, comparing them to what we know those metrics should be based on the rest of our traffic. We use something pingdom to keep track of uptime and latency of all our CDN accounts from lots of vantage points worldwide. You should be set up with multiple CDNs always and be prepared to change at the flip of a DNS or application switch. SimpleCDN went bye-bye basically overnight; even LimeLight and Akamai are not immune to all network problems.

Answer 2

This Video is uploaded and hosted on a Dedicated Server (Video Streaming via Origin Pull CDN). We have via DNS (CNAME record) attached a CDN, which in turn cache the video onto Servers around the world. Click here to test video. Voxel is the CDN used. Please go to www.cdnxite.net and tell us what to think.